INTRODUCTION. 



Man was a necessity to the creation ; and it is with him alone 

 that the intelligence of created things began. 



Bacon has given an admirable definition of science : " Science," 

 pays he, "is man added to nature." In vain would the earth open 

 its bosom to show in broad day the combinations of its metals, the 

 agglutination of its stones, or the crystallization of its salts ; in 

 vain would the emerald or topaz exist in transparent columns, and 

 the waters gush through the rent rocks in limpid and living 

 streams ; all these sublime phenomena would be without value, 

 without object; in a word, Nature would not be understood, if man 

 had not been created to know and describe her. 



Indeed, if we carry our thoughts back to the primitive ages of the 

 world, to those epochs that preceded the appearance of man upon 

 the earth, we discover that every thing the imagination finds to dwell 

 upon is gigantic, without form and monstrous ; the mind passes in 

 fear from an account of a revolution to the history of the deluge, 

 where there is nought but destruction and submersion, painful labor 

 and abortion. Pyrites enkindle the volcanoes; burning sulphur 

 perpetuates these vast conflagrations; boiling waters are decom- 

 posed in their fires ; from these craters rush forth flames and burn- 

 ing lava; their accumulations are projected into the midst of rivers, 

 which are thus turned violently from their course ; electric detona- 

 tions shake the earth far and wide, and open it in frightful rents ; 

 the ocean beholds its bed torn up by volcanic eruptions ; new isles 

 raise their smoking heads above the waves ; and, too ponderous for 

 the pedicles that support them, like some magic promontories, they 

 soon disappear, and the heaps of their ruins form the base of steep 

 rocks which may at some future time become vast continents. 



In these incoherent preludes we perceive chaos ; and it is only 

 at remote periods, we are permitted to detect some unfinished phe- 

 nomena of an uncertain and incomplete life; a life which struggles 

 against nihility, and overcomes it only with difficulty; a life that 

 would take possession of the globe, and which contends against 

 the laws of inert matter, whose dominion is universal. 



In this, then, behold what nature was without man. . . . But if 

 man appear, if, to recur to the brilliant thought of Bacon, " man 

 'ft added to nature," then Creation has a voice, a value, a sense. 



